Fantasy Writing

Visual Story Skeleton

I’m a visual person. I have come to realize that writing for me is not pure words, but comes with images as well and sometimes the better tool for planning my writing is a combination of words and images. I’m thinking specifically of the broad story plot, or the skeleton that we hang all the characters (heart and brain), action (muscles), and description (skin, yucky image) on. Mixing words and images on paper lets me better understand what scenes are low key, which are BOOMING, where things are dark, what flows in the main story river, and what are secondary islands (I really use hand-drawn text and pictures on physical paper, but have substituted some random font changes here to help make the point).

In revisiting my stories recently, I’ve created a visual story skeleton for both new ideas and one completed book and it’s giving me some new confidence in both editing and forging ahead with new ideas. I can FEEL the story better when I see it in this fashion and I can see holes in story arc beter.

I’d show you an example, but why don’t we wait until I’ve published one of the books first, so the skeleton doesn’t contain any spoilers. 😀 So, in other words, if I have some publishing success, I promise to show the related skeleton (assuming I have one and can find it).

Happy Writing! And if we have a zombie apocalypse in the meantime, don’t let those skeletons get you. 😉